Destined for Unfulfillment

Unfulfilled destinies are poised like an electric spiderweb over the characters in The Shawl and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.

Though the characters in these books could not come from more divergent backstories, the end is always the same: they are predestined to live unfulfilling lives in the service of cruel monotony or crippling suppression. It binds them together when they normally would care to live apart. "She knew little about Magda's mind at this age, or whether she had any talents - even what her intelligence toward," says Rosa, imagining what her daughter's personality might have been like had she survived the concentration camps. While Rosa was quick to initially point out "there might be something amiss with her intelligence" when Magda lacked a voice in the camps, this does not stop the mother from speculating - wishing, really - that her child grew into success later on in life. Her speculation could be seen as a direct challenge to predestination - was Magda genuinely as unintelligent or as stunted as she seemed, and could her early death be seen as a fulfillment of her destiny to die young before she realizes her handicap, as people who have handicaps often due later in life, an act of mercy? - or is a paeon to a destiny that was ultimately sideswiped by the Nazis, outside forces? Destiny is usually portrayed as immutable, but Ozick's vision of destiny seems to be fragile, as fragile and as malleable and as symbolic as the lettuce carried by the woman on the train. Ozick wants us to continually question the role destiny does, or does not, play in The Shawl and life itself, in much the same way Rosa butts heads with predestination every time she writes a letter to her dead daughter. Men and tradition, as well the women themselves, serve the same purpose as the Nazis do in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. However, Allison's vision of destiny is much less ambiguous and much less open to the idea of change in comparison to Ozick's.

Destiny is, perhaps, a product of the environment in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. "We were hard and ugly and trying to be proud of it. The poor are plain, virtuous if humble and hardworking, but mostly ugly. Almost always ugly," says Allison. Allison's interpretation of southern tradition is less than comforting. It's a good ol' boys club and the women aren't even afforded the luxury of fluidity. They can't bend nor exaggerate , or create their own path in life because everything - life, men, preformed, long-held ideas - are so stacked against these women. Women in Allison's world are indoctrinated the moment they are born into the community. Opportunities outside the beaten path are virtually non-existent, and if they do exist, the resistance must seem damning. Hardness and toughness and virtousness and tenacity are beautiful traits (I mean, the era of the wilting flower is over, right?), but not when they are essentially forced upon an entire subsect of people, as they are in Allison's neighborhood. Allison's more explicitly physical description of the women in her community furthers this idea. "Solid, stolid, wide-hipped baby machines. We were all wide-hipped and predestined," says Allison. The emphasis placed on "wide-hipped," as well as "predestined," juxtaposes the physical with the metaphysical, suggesting destiny is as much 'written in the stars' as it is written in the village and in the heart.